May's Florence speech venue represents European unity, not division

The most charismatic of Santa Maria Novella’s artistic ghosts left no visible trace there. In 1503, Leonardo da Vinci was handed the keys to a set of rooms off its cloisters, where he lived for the next few years at the expense of the Florentine Republic; thinking, inventing and occasionally working on the Mona Lisa. He even seems to have built a flying machine there. The same rooms adjacent to the church were the venue for May’s Florentine address.

It is fitting that the greatest genius of the Renaissance walked the aisles of this church because it is a living museum of the movement that made him. This gothic church became a symbol of a new ideal in 1470 when Leon Battista Alberti gave it a classical facade with two enormous stone scrolls supporting an imitation Roman temple. Alberti was one of the pioneers of the Renaissance dream of reviving the glories of ancient Greece and Rome. He theorised its new science of perspective painting. As it happens, the first completely convincing perspective painting, Masaccio’s Holy Trinity, is in this church.

The Renaissance is not just a beautiful chapter in Europe’s history but the moment the continent became self-conscious. Alberti’s facade expresses a reverence for the classical heritage that meant by definition seeing Europe – once ruled by Rome as a single empire – as a common culture with a shared history. The EU is the ultimate result of this Renaissance discovery of Europe as a cultural community.

May tried in her speech to claim that same Renaissance heritage for a post-Brexit British relationship with Europe, and the whole point of going to Florence was presumably to symbolise this. But the Renaissance, like the EU, believed in Europe as an idea, not just a geographical accident.

The use of Latin as a common intellectual language (Newton wrote his Principia in it) and the trans-European friendships of Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Thomas More all show how the supposedly “abstract” EU dream is actually a direct continuation of the Renaissance. Brexit is clearly a rejection of it, and May’s sudden Florentine conversion seems desperate. What circle of Dante’s Florentine masterpiece The Inferno is this anguished prime minster in?

Yet the dark side of Europe can also be seen here. In Filippino Lippi’s fresco of an ancient Roman temple of Mars, the war god presides over fascistic trophies. Lippi was prophetic. In March 1944 a train left Santa Maria Novella station, just across the piazza from the church, en route for the death camps. Santa Maria Novella shows just how much there is to lose from rolling back the Renaissance dream of European civilisation.